Release dates/nomenclature

[Dirk Mueller]

On Friday, 31. August 2007, Allen Winter wrote:

> > OK, I'll do some date-squeezing and move things back two weeks.
> > How does December 12th sound?
> Countering my proprosal, how about Dec 6?
> We can make the Beta4 only 2 weeks long.

what is part of the December release (12th or 6th doesn't count)?

I think if we delay the KDE "desktop" release into december (which I agree 
with), then we should release libs earlier. I think it is possible to release 
the libs by the end of october like planned. 

Releasing the libs earlier has two advantages: 

a) it is possible to add new features needed for apps without risking binary 
compatibility burdens becase we do a mistake last minute

b) we somehow meet our deadline. We're slipping already bad, and slipping has 
to stop. 

c) 3rd party applications who have already ported (digikam, amarok, ktorrent, 
there are probably many others) have something to require and build on. it 
wouldn't be bad for apps to be available before the desktop release either. 


Release date juggling aside, I'm quite concerned about the recent trend of 
blogging how bad KDE4 is. It is time to advertise that we have to eat our own 
dogfood, and that KDE4 will stay a vision forever if developers don't start 
to use it and fix the glaring bugs. I know that part of the pain is that 
there is no stable mail client for KDE4, and no IRC client at all. These are 
things that we should perhaps somehow address ;)

I can only say that I tried to switch my development desktop to KDE4, and it 
is still very painful, as barely anything works, and I'm busy compiling after 
krazy check changes instead of getting things done. This has to stop! It 
takes me almost two work days go get things recompiled, and I cannot do 
something during that time on it. 

This is a much more important topic than juggling tagging dates around. If we 
continue like that, we loose the bugfixers because there is no point in 
fixing KDE3.x bugs anymore, and we loose the app code monkeys, because there 
is no foundation they could base their work on. 



Dirk